These being said, I would also add, in response to the young man, that there are things which no one else can do for you. If people expect us to make efforts that should spare them any effort, then this is an expectation we cannot fulfil. I cannot eat for someone else, I cannot think for someone else, I cannot build for someone else. I can do all those things uniquely on my behalf, merely hoping that they will radiate effectively. The young generation is right in demanding reference points, in expecting some kind of orientation around. Yet it should not depute the issue of its own destiny to some abstract mentors.

A.M.: I will ask you a rhetorical question: is Păltiniş still possible today?

Andrei Pleşu: No! Definitely not! And it?s for the better it isn?t. First of all, because the idea to clone a moment of grace is inconsistent. The value of Păltiniş also resides in its being unrepeatable. If we serialise Păltiniş, the model itself will decay, the serialisation will work against it as well. Secondly, because we live in a different world and, of course, Noica is no longer around. And the figure of the mentor is crucial here. After all, we no longer live under the same sky and the stars play a different tune? Reiteration seems to be both impossible and undesirable. But if today?s Păltiniş is called New Europe College, then yes!

A.M.: Th New Europe College is, indeed, a Păltiniş of our times, in the sense that it is a scientific reunion of fellows that is quite alive, truly invigorating and highly competent; yet, it is not based on personal affinities or common intellectual interests, it does not involve a special human bondage. Păltiniş welcomed a type of encounter that was informal, absolutely free and that held on thanks to shared events. Today, everything in the intellectual domain is or tends to be institutionalised. We are no longer very keen on the informal. It is probably the normal course of things: we have invested in the public space what we were not allowed to expose previously, and we tend to feel that whatever lacks its geometry and prestige is of a minor importance.

Andrei Pleşu: I have already spoken of the community side of Păltiniş. It had the quality of the colloquial, the group there had become a unitary organism. I feel bound to say that there is something we lack nowadays as a premise for a community of the same type. Păltiniş was a community space, yet one of its ingredients was loneliness as well. We were together there, and Păltiniş became, at some point, a place for pilgrimage, yet, circumstances considered, it was, within the context of the day, a moment of solitude too. It was Noica?s solitude, his ?winter?, surrounded by our small centripetal solitudes. When I say solitude, I mean good solitude, in this case. Part of our lives was also the awareness that what we did there could not turn into an institution, could not have direct bearing on our public lives, that it was a solitary experience. Now, it seems, the good face of solitude is shaded away. People have lost their sense of the benefic solitude, that is of the individual?s confrontation with his question, with his star, with his wager. Emphasis is now placed differently, hierarchies have changed, things go by other rhythms and, for the time being, there is a loss of solitude setting in. The informal type of group cannot exist unless three or four people agree to experience good solitude together.